


The First Of Many.

by RT Fice (RT_Fice)



Series: A Beetlejuice Valentine. [9]
Category: Beetlejuice (1988), Beetlejuice (TV 1989), Beetlejuice - All Media Types
Genre: Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Getting to Know Each Other, Horrible Day At School, New Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 15:56:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17511542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RT_Fice/pseuds/RT%20Fice
Summary: Tiny drops of things going wrong cause an avalanche of an awful day for twelve-year-old Lydia.  Beetlejuice has never seen her like this, and their two-month-old friendship shifts.This takes places two months after "Falling In Loathe: How Beetlejuice & Lydia Met."  If you haven't done so, I recommend reading that story first.





	The First Of Many.

It wasn't one big thing that made Lydia's day horrible.  It was a series of small things.

She woke up feeling uncentered. That was the only word for it.  It was like she felt when the beginning of a cold was creeping around the corner, yet she knew she wasn't getting sick.  It was late January, far past the time she typically fought off colds.

Delia made breakfast. That was bad enough.  Declaring Lydia was "whiter than a Norwegian," Delia concluded that it was due to a lack of protein.  This morning the woman set a plate before Lydia that had a slice of hard, cold toast with an egg on top.  Lydia hated eggs in any way, shape, or form.  She even refused to drink eggnog during Christmas time.  This thing in front of her looked like a white oyster, which Lydia also found disgusting, with a yellow yolk covered by a opaque, white film.  It made the girl think of the old man's eye in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."  An eye so appalling it caused a man to kill.

"Oh, for god's sake, try it!"  Delia stabbed the yolk with a knife, perhaps bizarrely concluding that this would encourage her step-daughter.  Instead, Lydia's gorge rose as the sickening yellow ran from the puncture like pus from an erupting boil.

Lydia pushed her plate away.  "I'm not hungry."  It was quite true.

In Algebra Miss Blithe returned their tests from the previous day.  She paused by Lydia's desk as the girl sighed at her C minus.  "I hope you have no aspirations toward higher education," said the teacher.  "A more than rudimentary grasp of mathematics is required.  Your brain, Miss Deetz, is not wired that way."

By Gym Lydia was quite hungry, and lacking the fuel needed to cope with dodge ball.  Obviously dodge ball had been invented by a sadistic, child-hating bastard.  What on earth were they supposed to learn from hitting each other as hard as possible with a ball that felt more like concrete than rubber?  There was no team, no attempts to protect one another.  It was Last Girl Standing, and the last girl, on this day being Lydia, was taunted by the rest of the class until the ball slammed into her chest and knocked her breathless onto the hard wood floor on her elbow.

In English Mrs. Cargill said to the class, "We continue our study of metaphors.  Who can give me a metaphor for Life?"

Lydia raised her hand.  "Dodge ball," she offered, proudly.

The instructor blinked.  "That makes no sense at all."

Lunch's main course was a creamy casserole with bits of pale yellow and green things and limp pasta.  It looked as if it had been predigested for their convenience and vomited onto their plates.  Queasy, Lydia nibbled stale saltines meant for salads.

In Science the lesson was Newton's Second Law of Mass and Acceleration.  When Lydia set her wooden car laden with metal washers on the ramp it escaped her prematurely, zoomed down the ramp and off the table, crashed on the floor, and broke off a wheel, which rolled under the radiator.  The class laughed, not kindly.

Her Art teacher loomed over her drawing of a car accident, inspired by her wayward science car, and scrunched her face with so much disapproval Lydia could see up her nostrils.  "Art is meant to add _beauty_ to the world, Lydia.  No more red crayons, please."

On the walk home she slipped on ice under the snow and fell on her already sore elbow.

"I'm home."  Lydia couldn't hear herself for the racket.  She peeked into the window of Delia's studio next to the house.  The woman wore ear-plugs, goggles, and was jack-hammering a boulder that had been dragged up from the Winter River.

"I'm home."  The door to her father's office was open.  Smiling, Lydia looked in.  Charles had two laptops, a small TV set on CNN,  and he was speaking loudly into his phone in order to be heard over his wife's artistic endeavors.

"I won't say whether I voted for him or not, but have you _seen_ the markets?  All indicators are pointing south, Stan!  _South!_ "  Charles turned, phone pressed snugly to his ear, and spotted Lydia.  He wiggled his fingers in greeting and walked toward her.

"Father, I--"

He shut the door in her face.  Blinking, Lydia heard him say, "It's a buyer's market, Stan!  According to StreetEasy, the New York housing market is going to see an upward spike in inventory!"

Percy had vomited a hairball on her bed.  Sighing, Lydia balled up the blanket, stuffed it in the washer, poured in soap without bothering to measure, and returned to sit glumly on her bed without changing from her school clothes.

"Babes!"

Lydia slowly looked up in response to the deep, raspy voice.

Beetlejuice emerged from her bureau's mirror, his yellow eyes beaming eagerly.  "Yer home!  So!  How was school?"

Lydia had barely spoken the entire day.  The ability failed her now.  Her lips quivered.

"Whoa."  The ghost floated in mid air in front of her.  "Jeezus, who died?"  He grinned.  "Wait!  It was _me!_ "  He laughed maniacally, until he noticed that she wasn't joining in.

Lydia fought it.  She fought it with all her twelve-year-old heart.  But for some reason, what she couldn't do in front of her parents, her teachers, her schoolmates, happened now.  Tears came.

In alarm, Beetlejuice watched the silvery wetness trace down her flushed cheeks.  He'd seen her angry, furious, frustrated, upset, but he'd never seen her cry, not even the time she fell off her bike and scraped her knee bloody.

Lydia didn't know why she felt safe enough to do it.  She'd only been friends with the ghost since Halloween, a little more than two and a half months ago.  But she began weeping.

Watching the little girl shake, tears streaming down her face, whatever remained human in the poltergeist wrenched.

Lydia had never had a friend she could cry in front of, not since kindergarten.  When her mom left, Lydia had steeled herself.  Father was more of a wreck than she was.  Though he tried to hide it, she heard him crying.  At age nine she felt she had to comfort and console him, because having your sole adult parent possibly falling apart and leaving as well was too scary to consider.

Charles' relatives told he and Lydia to buck the hell up, it was just a divorce, for god's sake.  Most of them were on their third.

When Delia came on the scene, she whipped Charles into shape.  But she was not someone who wanted anyone, especially not her step-daughter, to "be emotional", though Delia had no problem inflicting her emotional roller-coaster on her new family.

There was no question that Lydia did NOT want the ghost to see her like this.  Yet, somehow, being with him, her wall shattered.

They had never touched.  They had never hugged.  There'd never been reason to.  They'd often sat side by side, but without contact.  Neither the poltergeist nor the little girl was aware this was the case, or had consciously avoided crossing some line of etiquette.

Beetlejuice sat down next to her now. He was silent when his hand reached out and slipped around her shaking shoulders.  There was no resistance or self-consciousness from either of them as, quietly, only the bed-springs creaking, the ghost shifted closer and pulled her head onto his shoulder.

Lydia exploded into sobs.

With a forefinger, Beetlejuice juiced the four large pillows into a pile against the headboard.  He scooted over to them and leaned back, holding the girl against him.  She clutched his lapel.  Her waterfall of tears soaked through his shirt.

The poltergeist pondered if he'd been touched by tears ever before, physically or psychologically.  In his history of haunting he'd seen oceans of weeping, and each drop delighted him.

His right arm was around her shoulders, its hand stroking her hair.  His left hand gestured toward the bedroom door.  It opened, and a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom across the hall floated in.  The door closed.  Beetlejuice twisted his wrist, and the lock securely clicked.

He held the TP in his lap.  Lydia's sobs weakened to crying.  With one hand he unscrolled the paper and offered the end to the girl.

Lydia's left shoulder tucked into his right armpit as she snuggled deeply into his hug.  Feebly, she tore off a hunk of paper and blew her nose, loudly.

Her sniffling and nose blowing went on for quite a while.  Percy batted a wad of used tissue around the bed.

Beetlejuice tried not to feel what he was feeling.  For once in his life and Afterlife, he felt truly scared.   There were only two things that could do that.  Sandworms terrified him.  So did the idea of being exorcised.  But he could comprehend those things.

This was beyond his experience.

Before or After death,  he was regularly unkind, often cruel, extracting his humor and enjoyment from the discomfort and fear of others.  He never felt that he'd missed anything from life, and he didn't feel any emptiness in death.  Was that why he'd transformed into a poltergeist, because he had the tendencies before he died?  Certainly a kind person could never be one.

This feeling, of wanting to comfort, to protect, and to experience actual pain at the sight of another person, a little girl, no less, in pain.... it was horrible.

The cool air-temperature of Beetlejuice's body reminded Lydia that he wasn't human, not anymore.  She waited to feel afraid.  It didn't come.  Why did she feel more comfortable with her head on his chest, and his chin on the top of her head, than she did when her father held her?  Everything told her she _should_ be afraid.  She felt the exact opposite.

Lydia murmured, "Your arm's gonna fall asleep."

"It's already dead."

"Oh.  Right."

"Go to sleep."

"Should go down to dinner."

"Go to sleep."

"'kay."

While he stoked her hair, she closed her eyes.  She sighed, deeply, with comfort, with relief.  In a minute she melted into sleep.

Beetlejuice's head fell back on the pillows.  He stared at the bed's canopy.  He blinked repeatedly, in confusion.  Echoing the little girl curled against his chest, under his protective arm, he sighed and closed his eyes.  He had no intention of moving until Lydia woke up.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm having a Not So Good Day, and writing this was a way of coping with it.
> 
> I share Lydia's aversion to eggs (except, very rarely, a cheddar cheese omelet). Her experiences with teachers are pretty much my own. A math teacher actually said to me what Miss Blithe says to Lydia. My opinion of dodge ball is the same as hers.
> 
> If you've never read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," you can do so here: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/telltale.html


End file.
